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How Chinese Can Openers Destroyed America

Doctors call them symptoms. Intelligence analysts call them indicators. Let’s call them little things that mean a lot and point to larger problems and events.

For example, Chinese can openers.

Growing up, we had manual can openers: sturdy made-in-America jobs that lasted forever. In the Marines, one of us discovered the P-38, the magnificent C Ration can opener you hung on your dog tags. The last P-38 was retired sometime in the 1980s—abandoned for a Japanese electric can opener.

The electric can opener died a few months ago, and it was replaced by a manual one.

It’s now six manual can openers later, each costing anywhere from $2.49 to $15. None worked very well or lasted very long. They did, however, have one thing in common. They were all made in China.

And can openers have come to signify, for us, how cheaply we have sold our birthright and our blessing.

The Chinese now have our money. They offered us that irresistible combination of 19th century wages, 21st century technology, nonexistent environmental safeguards, zero lawsuits and no worries about healthcare. They flooded us with cheap everything, which for decades we purchased on expensive credit. We sacrificed tens of millions of jobs and entire industries on the altar of cheap.

Money talks. Let us listen to what the Chinese are telling us now with their money. You’ll find a brilliant strategy. Sun Tzu, a military strategist who is believed to have written the ancient book “The Art of War,” said that no one should be able to divine the general’s plans. In this case, the plan is right out in the open for anyone who cares to look.

The Chinese, who have no present mortal enemies, are funding our wars.

America’s true strategic vulnerability is economic. Sure, go spend a trillion or two more in Afghanistan. We’ll lend you the money. For now.

Resources

Meanwhile, the Chinese are buying into resources: oil in Iraq, copper in Afghanistan, everything in Africa they can get their hands on. They’re also building relationships. No invading armies, no promises of “Work hard and someday you too can be Chinese.” Just—relationships.

The Chinese, in concert with some of our putative friends, are undertaking the slow process of replacing the dollar as a global reserve and trading currency.

Try buying oil then.

Their military transformation, funded by, among other things, the repetitive purchase of dysfunctional can openers, is brilliant. They have an army adequate for domestic use. A regional navy and air force. Missiles galore. And China now is a serious space-faring power.

But China’s ultimate weapon isn’t hardware. It’s people. The day they decide to develop their domestic consumer market, our globalized corporations will no longer need Americans, to produce or to consume. Sorry. The market made us do it.

Finally, courtesy of their one child policy, China now suffers a major excess of men over women.

Suffers? That excess means millions of young men to deploy overseas as security forces, technicians, laborers, whatever. Since those men may never find Chinese wives, perhaps they’ll settle down and marry elsewhere.

Creating, in only a few decades, something akin to a new group—but loyal to China.

In sum, a brilliant strategy for peaceful global domination, brilliantly executed.

Tzu said that the greatest military excellence is to win without fighting.

They are his worthy heirs.

In the meantime American cats are awaiting their tuna. Let’s hope we can get the can open this time.

Glueck is a Newport Beach-based doctor who often writes for the Business Journal on legal issues in medicine.

Gold is a Shelton, Wash.-based historian whose new book, “Closing Ranks: The Citizen’s Guide to a New Defense,” is due in 2010.

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